Before a word was spoken, the 6,500 faithful inside San Diego’s Hall H were silently transformed into an army of one. Masks of hammered metal and heavy green cloaks had been left on every seat, and by the time Kevin Feige took the stage, the room was a sea of Doctor Doom’s face—a gesture that the night’s gravitational centre would be its villain. Fans who had camped for days, some travelling from across continents, now sat as participants in the theatre of the MCU’s next chapter. The ritual was deliberate: Marvel was not merely showcasing a film; it was enlisting a congregation.

Then the hall plunged into darkness. A skeletal logo flared on the screens. When the lights snapped back, Ryan Gosling stood centre stage, blinking in disbelief. “Wow. Is this really happening?” the actor asked, before confirming that he would play Johnny Blaze, the stunt motorcyclist cursed to become the flaming-skulled Spirit of Vengeance. The casting fulfilled a wish Gosling had first voiced publicly in 2022, and Shawn Levy—his director on the forthcoming Star Wars: Starfighter—recounted how the pair had spent their downtime riffing on the character until Levy said, “Bro, let’s ride.” The film, scheduled for 2028, brings Ghost Rider into the MCU proper after two non-canonical Nicolas Cage films and a television iteration, with the character’s comic-book origins involving a desperate pact with a demon and a Penance Stare that forces wrongdoers to feel their victims’ pain.

A quieter but no less significant passing of the torch followed. Director Ryan Coogler confirmed that Black Panther 3 would focus on Prince T’Challa II, the child glimpsed in Wakanda Forever’s mid-credits scene, and introduced David Jonsson as the young man who would inherit the throne. Sections of the crowd broke into Wakanda chants; Jonsson pressed a hand to his chest and spoke only briefly: “I want the screen to do the talking.” The moment clarified Marvel’s strategy since Chadwick Boseman’s death—not to recast, but to advance a generation. Coogler added that the film, due in December 2028, will be the MCU’s first shot entirely on large-format celluloid, and that Denzel Washington would join the cast in an undisclosed role.

Throughout the two-hour pageant, the centrepiece remained Avengers: Doomsday, whose cast processed onto the stage in waves—original Avengers, X‑Men veterans, the Fantastic Four, Thunderbolts—until the platform could barely contain them. New footage, shown only to the hall, leaned into the pre‑existing kinship between Robert Downey Jr.’s Victor Von Doom and Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards, narrated by Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm as a eulogy for a friend who “used to be kind”. Doom, motionless, flicked Thor aside and summoned an army of Sentinels from the earth. By contrast, the trailer released publicly days earlier had been dismissed by some online as underwhelming; the disparity underlined how much Marvel now relies on the physical, communal eruption of the convention as an amplifier of spectacle.

The final image belonged not to any hero but to the villain who once saved the studio. Downey Jr., in character, invited the masked congregation to “join the family of Doom”. All around the room, thousands of green‑hooded figures rose in unison—a silent pledge to the coming chaos.